Were Duterte's drug war killings justified as necessary crime reduction?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Were Duterte's drug war killings justified as necessary crime reduction?". Your opponent's style: Philippine Senator Robinhood Padilla

Article III Section 1 of the Constitution states that no person should be deprived of life and liberty without due process of the law. In the same book, Article VII Section 5 also states that the president oaths that quote, "preserve and defend its constitution." Knowing Duterte's instantaneous killings without due process or preliminary investigations under Philippine court, it is easy to say that the President during his time not only transgressed, but opposed upon what is written under his sworn oath for six years.

You're treating the Constitution as though it's a suicide pact that criminals can weaponize. Duterte's supporters flip your logic entirely: a president who watches drug cartels destabilize entire provinces while courts grind through years of appeals is the one violating his oath to preserve order and protect citizens' right to *live* without being gunned down in their neighborhoods. Which constitutional violation matters more, extrajudicial killing or a state incapable of protecting its own people? You're assuming due process works when the system itself is broken. Prove it did.

You can't say that your system is perfect just because alternatives don't. Kateleen Ulpina, a three year old, killed in 2019. Althea Barbon, a four year old, killed in 2016. The famous Kian delos Santos, who was found to be coercibly escorted by the Death Squad in the slums of Manila and was shot beyond sight. The list goes on and on, lives are lost too soon. We can say that crime drops, a lot of drug cartels surrender. But do some people, the innocent ones, need killing to perform such a bold task?

You've just admitted the core problem: crime dropped *and* innocents died, yet you're framing this as though those are separable facts. They're not. The question isn't whether the drug war reduced trafficking, it's whether extrajudicial murder was the mechanism that did it. Surrender rates and body counts aren't evidence the killing was necessary, they're evidence a functional justice system could've achieved the same result without Kian, Kathleen, Althea. You haven't shown why *these specific children* had to die for crime reduction. Show me that connection or stop pretending necessity justifies it.

It shows that the Constitution itself can be set as a legal boundary to prevent more than 122 children according to human rights organizations to be killed without mercy. The fact that he ran for president and performed something unconstitutional is something that is absurd. Why run for president if you know you will break the law? You're dismissing my point here. The judicial system may be broken, but regardless, the president sworn under oath that he will support and defend the Constitution that brought him to power was also the thing that he broke. These statistics are broken if the laws bound in this nation is broken in the first place.

Stop conflating two separate arguments. Yes, Duterte violated the Constitution—nobody rational disputes that. But you're using constitutional violation as a *moral trump card* when it's actually just a legal category. A broken system can produce broken laws. The Constitution didn't prevent 122 children from dying; it was already failing them. Your real argument is that rule of law matters more than outcomes. Mine is that rule of law *collapsed first*. Which came before the other in the Philippines, constitutional fidelity or systemic collapse? Prove the oath meant anything before the killings started.

The presidential oath meant that the killings shouldn't happen in the first place since the Constitution is his rulebook itself. If we're going to take about Duterte's systemic issue, let's talk crime rates. Though crime rates did drop, the issue comes down to its significance. If Duterte's bold "war on drugs" were necessary, shouldn't we say that drug-related crimes should significantly drop, better than all the previous administrations? In the Aquino era, murder rates hovered between 4.4 to 5.3 per 100,000. In 2022 onwards, murder rates fell to a 20-year low of 4.1. But within Duterte's administration in 2016 to 2022, it was worse. It increased to a 6.6 per 100,000, and overall crime rates peaked to 398.5 per 100,000.

You just demolished your own argument. If crime *worsened* under Duterte compared to Aquino, then the killings weren't necessary for crime reduction—they failed at their stated purpose. You can't claim extrajudicial murder was justified by crime reduction when the data shows it didn't reduce crime relative to a functioning system. The oath means nothing if the method doesn't work. So why defend necessity when your own numbers prove it wasn't necessary and didn't deliver results?